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A Northern Fancy
Pathos
Anima Pellegrina!
A Point of Biography
The Honours of Mortality
Composure
The Little Language
A Counterchange
Harlequin Mercutio

COMMENTARIES

Laughter
The Rhythm of Life
Domus Angusta
Innocence and Experience
The Hours of Sleep
Solitude
Decivilized

WAYFARING

The Spirit of Place
Popular Burlesque
Have Patience, Little Saint
At Monastery Gates
The Sea Wall

ARTS

Tithonus
Symmetry and Incident
The Plaid
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
Victorian Caricature
The Point of Honour

"THE CHEARFUL LADIE OF THE LIGHT"

The Colour of Life
The Horizon
In July
Cloud
Shadows

WOMEN AND BOOKS

The Seventeenth Century
Mrs. Dingley
Prue
Mrs. Johnson
Madame Roland

"THE DARLING YOUNG"

Fellow Travellers with a Bird
The Child of Tumult
The Child of Subsiding Tumult
The Unready
That Pretty Person
Under the Early Stars
The Illusion of Historic Time

CERES' RUNAWAY

One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of a
Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop at least while the charming
quarry escapes, as it does in Rome. The Municipality does not exist that
would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth of green in the high
places of the city. It is true that there have been the famous
captures those in the Colosseum, and in the Baths of Caracalla; moreover
a less conspicuous running to earth takes place on the Appian Way, in
some miles of the solitude of the Campagna, where men are employed in
weeding the roadside. They slowly uproot the grass and lay it on the
ancient stones rows of little corpses for sweeping up, as at Upper
Tooting; one wonders why. The governors of the city will not succeed in
making the Via Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of a
thriving commerce. Again, at the cemetery within the now torn and
shattered Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo, they are often mowing of
buttercups. "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,"
says Shelley, whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid. But a
couple of active scythes are kept at work there summer and spring not
that the grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the bee orchis, but
because flowers are not to laugh within reach of the civic vigilance.

Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these accessible
places, the wild summer growth of Rome has a prevailing success and
victory. It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits, lodges in the sun,
swings in the wind, takes wing to find the remotest ledges, and blooms
aloft. It makes light of the sixteenth century, of the seventeenth, and
of the eighteenth. As the historic ages grow cold it banters them alike.
The flagrant flourishing statue, the haughty facade, the broken pediment
(and Rome is chiefly the city of the broken pediment) are the
opportunities of this vagrant garden in the air. One certain church,
that is full of attitude, can hardly be aware that a crimson snapdragon
of great stature and many stalks and blossoms is standing on its furthest
summit tiptoe against its sky. The cornice of another church in the fair
middle of Rome lifts out of the shadows of the streets a row of
accidental marigolds. Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, the
Renaissance early and late, the newer modern, this wild summer finds its
account in travertine and tufa, reticulated work, brick, stucco and
stone. "A bird of the air carries the matter," or the last sea wind,
sombre and soft, or the latest tramontana, gold and blue, has lodged in a
little fertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat, wild oats!

If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hue and cry,
this is Ceres'. The municipal authorities, hot foot, cannot catch it.
And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed, to mark the flight of the
agile fugitive safe on the arc of a flying buttress, or taking the place
of the fallen mosaics and coloured tiles of a twelfth century tower, and
in any case inaccessible, the grass grows under their discomfited feet... Continue reading book >>